Tag Archives: brum

Brum City Council in England plugs wedding fair in our Magic City

thedistance

The City Council for England’s second largest city has done it again; they’ve confused the Magic City with the same name from across the pond with itself. This time, the official website for the city council of the British city shared information for the upcoming 1st Birmingham NotWedding as an event. This is despite the fact it will take place in our Birmingham’s Southside. The folks at NPR decided to do a news brief on the latest error last Friday. The confusion had already received attention from New York’s Daily News and UPI last Wednesday.

The last time we saw an online incident of confusion involving the British city of Birmingham and our own, it was during the summer of 2008 (and there was an earlier incident that January). It’s not like we haven’t seen the incident take place here either, as evidenced by this Birmingham Post article including an interview with yours truly. The end of the account filed by The Mirror on March 11 points out other recent gaffes associated with Brum. Mike Smith at The Birmingham News shares a more recent case of confusion involving citizens and plane tickets.

Maybe they should take a look at the one-off travel blog comparison between the two cities posted in 2011 on Tumblr (or the infographic that made its debut back in mid-2012.

 

Learn more about the Other Birmingham

screenshot from "The Other Birmingham"A couple of years ago there were a couple of incidents involving folks from Birmingham, AL and the city we’re named after, Birmingham, UKconfusing the skylines of the two cities separated by the Atlantic Ocean.

There’s an online resource that should help keep that from happening again.

The Other Birmingham was created by Fiona Cullinan, who originally created the piece for her travel journalism blog as a one-off. She has since maintained the site, enabling her to accept additional submissions about similarities between the two cities as well as suggestions about what else should be covered. There’s been a lot looked at already, including that growing list of similarities

By the way, there are several cities named Birmingham in the United States. They’re considerably smaller, like Birmingham, MO (population 214 according to the 2000 Census) and Birmingham, MI (pop. 19,291) to not even in existence anymore (e.g., Birmingham, KY).